Corps alerted to coming flood

Emails show April confidence was doused by May rain

Jul. 24, 2011

Water flows June 3 at Gavins Point Dam in South Dakota. Email traffic in the U.S. Corps of Engineers shows a growing concern last spring about flood potential along the Missouri River, before May rains in Montana that corps officials say created a management problem. / Elisha Page / Argus Leader

Written by

Cody Winchester

HELP REPORT THE STORY

This story is based on thousands of pages of emails and other documents obtained from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers by the Argus Leader and Gannett Washington Bureau under the Freedom of Information Act.These documents are available to at the bottom of this story.YOUR TIPS: We're interested in what you find. No one person can study every document that is available and often the best experts are the people on the ground or in the towns where the news happens. If you see something in these documents that you find interesting, please contact us. It could be a comment, a date or a figure that seems out of place or just interesting. It could be a statement that contradicts something you've heard or read. Or it could be a characterization of a situation that you just know is right or wrong.The bits of the emails key to this story have been highlighted but it's only a fraction of what is available on our website.Here is the contact information if you find something:• Reporter Jonathan Ellis, 605-575-3629, jonellis@argusleader.com• Reporter Cody Winchester, 605-331-2320, cwinchester@argusleader.com• Managing Editor Patrick Lalley, 605-331-2291, plalley@argusleader.com• Or call the newsroom at 1-800-530-NEWS (6397)

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The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers was warned by multiple sources early in the year that major flooding was likely on the Missouri River.

But by the time officials moved to "evacuate" upstream reservoirs in anticipation of snowmelt, they were hampered by downstream flooding that prevented them from releasing more water, internal emails show.

In January, corps officials were aware of above-average snowpacks in the Rocky Mountains. And they had National Weather Service reports showing that soil conditions had water saturations as high as 99 percent in much of the Dakotas and Montana.

Until mid-April, officials were confident they could manage the situation without major flooding. But within a few weeks the situation unraveled, leading to the most serious flooding on the Missouri in decades.

Those conclusions come from thousands of pages of internal emails and reports obtained by the Argus Leader and Gannett Washington Bureau under the Freedom of Information Act.

The request includes exchanges between Jody Farhat, chief of the water management division for the corps' Omaha District, and other top officials in the corps as they struggled to manage the situation.

The emails provide insight into a slow-moving disaster, one that increased in severity in mid-May. As flooding intensified, brought on by unusually high rainfalls, the corps' response increasingly became scrutinized by state and federal political leaders up and down the river. In the end, almost everything that could go wrong did.

Now, as the flooding slowly recedes, political leaders in states along the Missouri River want to know what happened. U.S. senators, including South Dakota's Tim Johnson and John Thune, held a hearing last week.

And Gov. Dennis Daugaard will meet with other governors next month in Omaha to address future flooding issues.

While states along the Missouri have competing interests - shipping, recreation, wildlife protection - flood control is something they share in common.

"I think the governors want to understand one another," Daugaard said Friday. "I'm hoping that while we might disagree on some management practices of the corps, we should be able to agree that the first priority is flood control."

System in 'excellent shape' in January

Even in January, there was growing alarm. North Dakota officials worried about mounting snowfall totals and they made their concerns known to the Corps.

On the lower end of the river, Bill Lay, a Missouri farmer and member of the Missouri Levee and Drainage District Association, sent Farhat an email asking whether there was enough storage capacity in lower reservoirs to handle the impending melt.

Farhat responded that the system was in "excellent shape to capture this year's runoff and prevent flood damage downstream." While the snowpack was up, "at this time it doesn't appear to be more than we can handle," she wrote Lay.

On the last day of January, the six upper basin dams held 56.9 million acre feet, just 100,000 acre feet above the corps' annual flood control pool. In an interview Friday, Farhat said the situation was under control in January.

"Being a little bit ahead of normal on the first of January is not anything to be concerned about," she said. Snowpack normally peaks April 15. It didn't happen this year.

"At a time we're expecting it to turn over and start melting, it rose," she said.

February's climate outlook brought more bad news, predicting higher snowfalls in the northern Rockies and lower-than-normal temperatures leading to a late runoff.

North Dakota officials sensed trouble. They called a meeting Feb. 10 of state and federal officials in Bismarck. The aim was to get federal and state agencies preparing for flooding.

"There was no sense of panic at this point," said Cecily Fong, a spokeswoman with North Dakota's Department of Emergency Services who attended the meeting. "This was us getting together with all the people we felt had skin in the game."

On Feb. 11, a corps memo noted "abnormally high snowpack and high snow-water equivalents throughout the Omaha District. The unusual conditions are widespread across a large geographical area."

The memo concluded that all reservoirs with the exception of Garrison Dam would have their flood control pools "evacuated" before March 1.

But there were problems downstream. Tributaries to the Missouri already were flooding, and there were calls to hold back on releases from Gavins Point Dam near Yankton.

Trying to balance interests in releases

"I had many people in the lower basin calling up and asking us to reduce releases," Farhat said in the interview this past week. "But we try to balance those upper basin and lower basin interests, always."

Meanwhile, the snow continued to pile up in March. On the last day of the month, Farhat received an email from headquarters in Washington: "As you know, the record snowfall in Montana has created an unusually high flood risk this spring," it said.

Many names of emailers corresponding with Farhat were redacted in documents supplied to the Argus Leader and Gannett.

On April 1, Farhat received a runoff forecast from an official whose name was redacted. It predicted a major runoff.

Farhat responded: "While I don't oppose what you've come up with as your runoff forecast, I do believe it's on the strong side considering what is actually out there in terms of plains snowpack." Mountain snowpack, she added, is "nothing to write home about."

Fear that concerns were being ignored

By April 4, with storage in the reservoirs on the rise, she bumped up releases on the dams by 10,000 cubic feet per second. That same day, she received an email from an operations manager, whose name was redacted. The manager wrote that the concerns of other managers weren't being addressed on monthly forecast calls. The official said one outcome might be that managers "will not even bother to call in, or provide input, if they feel like they're not being heard."

"We're all concerned about being in our exclusive flood control zones ... but what concerns me more is the feedback that I'm hearing: 'It doesn't matter what we say so we may as well keep our mouths shut,' " the official wrote.

The official continued: "Comments like, 'the snowpack above Oahe is gone' raise a concern for us when we know better. It might be a small percentage of the Oahe drainage basin, but it's not gone."

Foreshadowing the freakish rain that soon would create further problems for the basin, the official also asked whether averaging is the best way to predict precipitation.

"It just seems to me that when we're in a drought cycle we overestimate the precip and when we're in a wet cycle we underestimate it," the official wrote.

Farhat last week said that local managers, who control smaller segments of the river, don't have a systemwide perspective.

"My answer to that is, we're looking at the entire basin, the whole 529,000 square miles, and we monitor the snowpack. We knew how much snow was there, in the mountains and on the plains, and we had accounted for that in our monthly study," she said. "Had that rain not fallen, the system would have easily been able to manage that snowpack. We've seen snowpack above that in other years."

But by late April, it was clear the situation was deteriorating. Top officials in the corps exchanged a flurry of emails about conditions in the Missouri basin. On April 17, Maj. Gen. Bo Temple sent out a blast email from headquarters quoting an official with the National Weather Service: All the ingredients were in place for major flooding.

There also was a new problem: The Mississippi River was flooding.

Farhat's counterpart in that district emailed her to see whether flows from the Missouri could be eased. Farhat responded that she wasn't sure they could legally ramp down flows as much as they wanted. The Missouri basin was critical, Farhat wrote, and it might end up being "one of the wettest years on record."

Lay, the Missouri farmer, emailed Farhat on April 25 telling her she might want to ease up on letting water out. She responded: We're "between a rock and a hard place on the Missouri River."

As officials debated in early May when to begin ramping up release amounts, they also debated about when to issue news releases. The public, particularly in Bismarck, N.D., was getting antsy.

Anxiety along river, questions for corps

In mid-May, an official relayed to Farhat the themes of a particular radio show. The official suggested they develop talking points. On May 17, an official with the corps participated in a radio program in Bismarck. A person called in with a question about rain and whether releases at Garrison Dam would be reduced if forecasted heavy rains came.

The official wrote Farhat: "I thought about this during today's call with the (emergency managers) and was surprised that nobody asked that question. I think this is something we should be prepared to discuss during Friday's call."

The corps' officials were working with North Dakota officials during this time to ramp up releases at Garrison from 54,000 cfs to 60,000 cfs. North Dakota officials wanted the releases held back a few days to give people time to prepare, and the corps agreed.

By May 19, "extensive and heavy rain" was moving throughout the district. More was expected, and snowpacks through the Rockies remained well above normal.

On May 21 an official wrote Farhat that there was a lot of water running in ditches in the area near the Garrison Dam. Should they hold back a planned increase of 2,000 cfs the next day to give the area time to drain? Farhat responded: "Sure."

The official responded: "Done - I talked to the Garrison operator."

The corps also was notified May 21 that 8 inches of rain had fallen in 48 hours in portions of Montana.

And the rain kept falling.

On May 24, Billings saw a record 3.12 inches. Officials scrambled to increase releases at Garrison to 85,000 cfs while searching for greater storage capacity in mountain reservoirs.

'I quit answering my phone,' Farhat said

Officials clearly were dejected.

Todd Lindquist, operations manager for the Garrison Dam, emailed Farhat on May 25 that North Dakota officials wanted to know whether releases would go to 85,000 cfs. Farhat emailed back that he was correct, and to call if he needed more information.

Lindquist responded: "I'm headed home. I no longer look people in the eye and tell them the forecast is 85,000 cfs from Garrison."

On May 23, Farhat sent an email to Col. Robert Tipton, deputy division commander for the corps' Northwest Division. "Sir," she wrote, "we are very concerned about conditions from Montana to Missouri. We need to increase releases throughout the system."

She predicted that Pierre and Bismarck would need "advanced measures" to protect public infrastructure. "The situation here is critical," she concluded.

More attention now was being focused on South Dakota. A corps official emailed Farhat on May 26 that Fort Pierre wanted the corps to begin lowering Lake Sharpe.

"Even if this does not have a major effect on the water surface in Pierre/Fort Pierre, public perception will be GREATLY POSITIVELY influenced if we do this," the corps official wrote. "My recommendation is that we DO this as soon as we can. With where we are going, anything that could help or even be perceived as helping needs to be accomplished."

Helping one area to detriment of another

But there was concern about what lowering Lake Sharpe would mean for downriver Native American tribes. Farhat ordered an assessment.

"We don't want to help out one area (Pierre) to the detriment of another, especially the tribes - it's an environmental justice issue. Perhaps with the high releases there won't be any impact, but we have to know that before we can say that."

The release volumes on the six dams also were moving up aggressively. By May 26, officials forecast releases of 100,000 cfs by mid-June and 110,000 cfs by early July - amounts well above previous records. And amounts that would mean major flooding for Pierre, Fort Pierre and Bismarck.

The upper Missouri River already had been drawing heavy interest from congressional delegations in flood territory. Officials were scrambling to hold conference calls for the politicians.

Then, on May 27, Tipton informed officials that President Obama wanted inundation maps for Bismarck and Pierre, which he termed a "hot tasker."

"Team, just so you are aware - POTUS is now very interested in the flooding on the upper Missouri," Tipton wrote. "We may have a lot more 'feeding of the beast' on this ... and this may be sooner rather than later."

Concerns also grew for Oahe Dam. The last time the dam experienced high water, the earthen embankment moved south. The corps dispatched geotechnical staff to begin taking instrument readings. It was an area of concern that needed to be watched.

Officials also were working on models of potential release volumes from the dams. Farhat noted May 28 that, "Just adding one rainfall event like the one two weekends ago pushed the releases up to 150,000 (cfs)."

And that's what happened. More rain came.

Later that day, the corps issued a news release stating that five of six dams would ramp up to 150,000 cfs by mid-June. The news release blamed the rain.

Today, Daugaard said he thinks the state should have received more advance notice. The state had only a few days to prepare for major releases. There was a lot of rain and snow, but, he added, "I don't have a more comprehensive understanding of whether those two things are sound defenses against those who say some better management could have been employed."

HELP REPORT THE STORY

This story is based on thousands of pages of emails and other documents obtained from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers by the Argus Leader and Gannett Washington Bureau under the Freedom of Information Act.

These documents are available below.

YOUR TIPS: We're interested in what you find. No one person can study every document that is available and often the best experts are the people on the ground or in the towns where the news happens. If you see something in these documents that you find interesting, please contact us. It could be a comment, a date or a figure that seems out of place or just interesting. It could be a statement that contradicts something you've heard or read. Or it could be a characterization of a situation that you just know is right or wrong.

The bits of the emails key to this story have been highlighted but it's only a fraction of what is available on our website.